XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has "A Lot Going On This Time"

[DKJones]

Yeah. openSUSE applies a fair amount of patches on top of grub for it to work seamlessly with the default setup.

It may have changed recently, but last time I used openSUSE, btrfs would inexplicably become read-only on a reboot.

I'm using btrfs on KDE Neon right now, and it's fine, but I thought that was quite amusing for a filesystem SUSE have insisted is enterprise-grade for quite a while now. Of course, it might be better on openSUSE now, and maybe it was better on SUSE proper even then.

[useless]

It may have changed recently, but last time I used openSUSE, btrfs would inexplicably become read-only on a reboot.

I'm using btrfs on KDE Neon right now, and it's fine, but I thought that was quite amusing for a filesystem SUSE have insisted is enterprise-grade for quite a while now. Of course, it might be better on openSUSE now, and maybe it was better on SUSE proper even then.

Maybe you tried at a time when it was rather easy to hit a ENOSPC because of the default snapper cleanup policy. Indeed, it has improved. Now that /home is just a subvol, there's no need to overrule the default partition size for /.

[Vistaus]

AFAIK you can't shrink a filesystem with Gparted (or any other Linux program) unless Linux has support for shrinking the filesystem anyway, and up until now XFS hasn't. Many people use XFS for a home partition and another filesystem (such as ext4) for everything else, so in that case it might be necessary to shrink the partition even if you don't have other distros and/or Windows or macOS on the system - but with XFS, you can't, so far.

Right now I have a 568G btrfs partition with Linux on it, with only 79G filled up - 45G of which is in home - so assuming I only have / and /home partitions, I could theoretically limit my / partition to 40G, or maybe twice that just to be safe - and use the rest for home, but if for whatever reason I needed to resize one of them and was using XFS, I'd be SOL.

Is there any downside to using XFS for a root partition, given that you say that most people don't use XFS as a root partition?

[DKJones]

Not that I know of, although perhaps people who do so find themselves resizing their other partitions, but not their home partitions. One could for example use the first half of a decent-sized disk for /home, and the other half for everything else, in which case you'd only have to resize everything else. That way you can put /home on XFS and forget about it, and use ext4 or btrfs for the partitions you want to resize.

[angrypie]

to do backup yo need to make space for backup partition first. which requires shrinking. i.e. in real world without "you are just holding it wrong" shrinking is a requirement

I back up to an external drive. Unless I somehow misunderstood what you said.

[pal666]

I back up to an external drive. Unless I somehow misunderstood what you said.

i said that the only way to do "backup and reinstall" instead of "shrink" starts with "buy extra set of storage", which is stupid